On Owning Our EA Affiliation

These are the risks—actual or perceived—that I mostly hear about when people choose not to publicly own their EA identity:

People don’t want to talk to you / take you seriously because you are affiliated with EA You won’t get some career opportunities because you are affiliated with EA

I think you left out another key reason: you do not agree with lots of EAs about lots of things and think that telling people you are an EA will give them false impressions about your beliefs.

I am a development economist, and I often tell other development economists that I am an EA. That tells them "this is someone who cares a lot about cost-effectiveness and finding impactful interventions, not just answering questions for the sake of answering questions", which is true. But if I said I was an EA to random people in the Bay Area, they would infer "this is someone who thinks AI risk is a big deal", which is not true of me, so I don't want to convey that. This example could apply to lots of people who work on global development or animal welfare and don't feel compelled by AI risk. (ETA: one solution would be to signal the flavor of EA you're most involved in, e.g. "bed nets not light cone" but it sounds like that would not be owning your EA identity publicly according to the OP.)

I also don't follow much of the media around EA. I don't have any special insight into the OpenAI board drama, or FTX, or anything. I don't see myself as a resource people should come to when they want to make sense of EA being in the news for whatever reason. I think this behavior is specific to me, so maybe it's not a great reason for others.

I very much appreciate you writing this, and writing it so well. I really resonate with a lot of this, though of course maybe my role as a professional EA community person makes it harder for me and others to trust my take.

I have mixed feelings on this one. The first two relate to distribution of responsibility and power:

• I have some concerns that this kind of logic often calls, as a practical matter, for rank-and-file EAs to sacrifice their own personal career and other interests due to the consequences of actions taken by higher-status EAs. FTX is the obvious example here. That does not sit well with me.
• Somewhat relatedly, problems of this sort often have two preconditions: "Jane would not want to publicly affiliate with EA to the extent it has become associated with X," and "EA became associated with X because of the actions of certain EAs." Cancelling either precondition is sufficient to prevent the state of the world in which Jane doesn't publicly affiliate with EA. Although there are some circumstances in which placing the burden on Jane may be appropriate or unavoidable, I don't think we should view Jane's desire as the problematic precondition by default. 

Two others relate to any potential implication that those who choose not to publicly affiliate are acting in an unfair/non-cooperative manner:

• Although I appreciate that free-rider problem is a term of art, I would want to be very careful in emphasizing that there appear to be few free riders in 2024 EA. It's very hard to view someone who donates 10% of their income, or who is working for far less than their private-sector salary, as a free rider.
• In terms of "passively benefit[ting] from EA without openly supporting it," it's unclear what should count as passively benefitting. In particular, there's at least some meaningful distance between OP and EA, and it doesn't seem to view itself as responsible for or accountable to the community (cf. point 5 of this comment). Absent evidence that OP cares whether people self-identify as EA, I don't think their funding would count. People were emphasizing that Manifest wasn't an EA event, SFF "explicitly does not identify as an EA Funder," etc. I don't think EA gets to take credit for actors who explicitly disclaim being EA entities, or who EAs will cast as non-EA actors when they do something controversial.

As far as a path forward, many other social movements (like religions and political parties) have managed to construct sub-brands or sub-identities that allow supporters to limit identification with elements of the larger group that they find problematic. For instance, one can identify with terminology that identifies you with Major Party X but makes it clear that you think the progressive (or conservative) wing is way off the mark. I don't sense that EA has managed to pull this off yet.

Thanks for writing this. I just wanted to quickly respond with some thoughts from my phone.

I currently like the norm of not publicly affiliating with EA but its something I've changed my mind about a few times.

Some reasons

I think EA succeeds when it is no longer a movement and simply a general held value system (i.e., that it's good to do good and try to be effective and to have a wide moral circle). I think that many of our insights and practices are valuable and underused. I think we disseminate these most effectively when they are unbranded.

This is why: Any group identity creates a brand and opportunities for attacking the brand of that group and doing damage by association.

Additionally, if you present as being in a group then you are either classed as ingroup or outgroup. Which group your in overwhelmingly affects people's receptiveness to you and your goals. For many people EA presents as a threatening outgroup which makes them feel judgement and pressure.

Many people who might be receptive to the idea of counterfactural or cost effectiveness related reasoning if it has a neutral source but unreceptive to it if they believe it comes from effective altruism.

I think most people care about progress on salient issues not effective altruism in the abstract. People are much more likely to be interested in philosophy which helps them to achieve a goal of reducing animal suffering or mental health issues or AI risks than figuring out how to be more effective at doing good.

What I think we should do

I think we should say things like I have been influenced by effective altruism, or reading doing good better really changed my mind about X but I think we should avoid presenting as EAs.

This seems consistent with my other behaviour. I don't call myself a feminist, consequentialist, animal welfare activist or longtermist etc, but these are all ideas/values which influenced me a lot.

I previously discussed the idea of fractional movement building and I think that that is still probably the best approach for EA to have more impact via influence on others. Basically you work on a thing that you think is important (e.g., a cause area) and allocate some fraction of your time to try to help other people to work on that thing or other things which are EA aligned.

So rather than being an EA affiliated movement builder you might be researcher trying to understand how to have some type of positive impact (e.g. reducing risks from AI) and navigating the world with that as your superficial identity. You can still organise events and provide support with that identity and personal brand and there no brand risk or association to worry about. You can mention your EA interest where relevant and useful.

And to be clear I think that people who are clearly ea-affiliated are doing good work and mostly aren't at any risk of major career damage etc. I just think that we might be able to achieve more if we worked in ways that they pattern matched better to more widely accepted and unbranded routes to impact (e.g., researcher or entrepreneur etc) than to activist/movement building type groups which are more associated with bad actors (e.g. cults and scams)

Of course these are not strong beliefs and I could easily change them as I have before.

I deeply appreciate you writing this and much agree.

I sometimes worry that EAs may optimize for consequences rather than for integrity and this may be the reason people distance themselves from EA.

[In my view it then creates a dangerous world of "solitude, filth and ugliness". :) ]

I have no issue being transparent about the various ways I am involved with EA organizations, institutions, and ideas but I find a lot of people want to identify me as "an EA", literally in introductory emails and stuff like that. I am very put off by this for two reasons:

One, the label applied to me as a person strikes me as incredibly arrogant; it seems to imply I consider myself more effective and more altruistic than people outside this community, which I absolutely do not. I'm doing my best just like every one else.

Two, after many years of engagement including being a cause-area organizer for my local chapter, going to EA global, reading every major book about EA and associated ideas, and spending countless hours on the 80k website and podcast, I still don't think I could fairly summarize some of the key principles in EA. I don't think it is particularly well-defined and those sources that aim to define it are often quite vague and inconsistent with one another. When I object that I do not commit to being fully non-particularist or accepting all the tenets of utilitarianism or some similar gripe, I hear from one corner that I misunderstand EA and EA doesn't demand that and from another corner that objecting to those things does in fact mean I am not aligned with EA. Thus, I don't feel comfortable identifying with the movement.

On the other hand, I am happy to acknowledge the quote positive influence various EA orgs have had on my work, my thinking, and even my values. I have a lot of appreciation for the EA movement (which I will readily tell my network) but I am not "an effective altruist."

One point of view I haven't seen represented so much here is that it can simultaneously be true that publically allying yourself with the community is good for the community, and yet overall not the right call. I'd like e.g. politicians to be able to take our good ideas and implement them without giving anything back, if that's the best way to get those ideas done. (That said, I'd like them to read this post and weigh up the costs and benefits, and particularly consider the points about transparency and ensure they aren't being outright deceitful about their links to the movement.)

Perhaps a bit of a ramble after reading your post and others, but I opted to click "comment" rather than delete it.

I pretty reflexively identify as and would not hesitate to associate myself with the EA community. A part of this is that I view my identity as an EA as relating to its core principles of a commitment to doing good and using reason to determine how best to do so. Although I  believe that much of the cause prioritization/downstream beliefs common in the EA community are wise and well-taken, I don't consider these to be essential to being an EA. Were it the case that I thought that the community was mistaken on any or many of its determinations, I would still consider myself to be EA. 

Of course, we cannot choose the inferences that others make when we say that we are EA, and thus one might risk people making assumptions or just getting unwelcome vibes. 

I wonder what could be done to spread a message that EA is about the fundamental commitment to doing good the best one can rather than commitment to specific cause areas or downstream beliefs. One issue is likely the relative unipolarity of EA funding. Even if members of the EA community disagree on downstream beliefs held by funders and cause area prioritizations, there will likely be less representation of this within EA  because it is unlikely that this work will get funded and EA is likely to be viewed as "what EA does" rather than "what people who identify/affiliate as EA think". Furthermore, it is likely that people who identify as EAs will be tempted to adopt beliefs and priorities that are funded by EA. 

I think there is just going to be a tension between the core principles of EA and the demonstrated actions of the EA community insofar as no person would be perfectly represented by its collective actions. And action is pretty heavily tethered to funding which the community has little ability to influence, so others may see an EA that reflects priorities and beliefs that an individual EA would not endorse. So, there is likely a gap between what you might mean when you say "I am EA" and what somewhat else might hear, and I understand why it might make more sense to be more concerned about the latter.

One of the things that comes to mind are the variety of beliefs that might fall under religious identities. People might have significant political disagreements, for instance, but come together as Christians under the belief that Jesus is the son of God who died for our sins. Getting EA to be more associated with its essential principles than downstream beliefs and conclusions might be critical to its expansion and making people more comfortable identifying/affiliating with it, but this would probably be a difficult project.

It is not clear to me that EA branding is net positive for the movement overall or if it's been tarnished beyond repair by various scandals. Like, it might be that people should make a small personal sacrifice to be publicly EA, but it might also be that the pragmatic collective action is to completely rebrand and/or hope that EA provides a positive radical flank effect.

The reputation of EA at least in the news and on Twitter is pretty bad; something like 90% of the news articles mentioning EA are negative. I do not think it inherently compromises integrity to not publicly associate with EA even if you agree with most EA beliefs, because people who read opinion pieces will assume you agree with everything FTX did, or are a Luddite, or have some other strawman beliefs. I don't know whether EAF readers calling themselves EAs would make others' beliefs about their moral stances more or less accurate.

I don't think this is currently true, but if the rate of scandals continues, anyone holding on to the EA label would be suffering from the toxoplasma of rage, where the EA meme survives by sounding slightly good to the ingroup but extremely negative to anyone else. Therefore, as someone who is disillusioned with the EA community but not various principles, I need to see some data before owning any sort of EA affiliation, to know I'm not making some anti-useful sacrifice.

I am also quite sad that EA has a less positive reputation than it did/could/'should'. I think EA ideas and communities being high-status and widely admired would be good for the world. And I think to make that happen it is useful for the the Rutger Bregman's and Yuval Harari's of the world to be public about EA-ish things. For 'normal' people like us without a lot of name recognition or large online following, my guess is that EA community building is best done just by talking with friends and acquaintances, than by having a quite EA online presence.

So where I have come down so far is to be quite open and forthcoming about my EA-ness in person, and to have some EA markings online (GWWC diamond on LinkedIn etc) but I semi-recently removed my surname from my EAF account. I think this is mainly a tail-risk insurance policy and will probably not be useful/important, but even a ~5% chance of the EA community's reputation deteriorating further and me wanting to get a non-EA job later means this very weak partial anonymisation is worth it. But I'm not at all sure about that, maybe there are important benefits to having a bio on the EAF about who I am and linking to my LinkedIn profile and so forth (though my guess is most people reading something I write on the Forum would be able to fairly quickly find/infer my surname if they want to).

I was surprised to see you mention at the end you didn't get a job offer partially because of being publicly EA as this seems to cut against your thesis? I think you are saying that the benefits are just large enough that that cost is bearable. Which makes sense, but not getting a job offer seems like quite a big cost to me, or at least that is something I care a lot about.

I often think about transparency in relation to allies, competitors and others:

• Allies are on my team. We have shared norms and can make deals
• Competitors are not on my team and are either working against my interests or too chaotic to work with
• Others are randoms I don't know enough about.

Generally I feel obliged to be truthful to allies and others and transparent to allies. So I'd say I like EA to anyone, but I wouldn't feel the need to reveal it to any random person and particularly not someone who is against me.

What I think is more interesting from some of this discourse is that people see eg their government employers as competitors here. I think that would change the frame of how I went to work if I didn't think I was in a collaborative relationship with my boss.

Notably, we asked about whether EAs had "experienced any reputational consequences (i.e., changes in others’ evaluation about you) from people not involved in the effective altruism community as a result of believing or acting on the ideas of effective altruism?" in EAS 2020.

A plurality reported no reputational effects at all, and substantially more people reported mostly positive effects than reported mostly negative effects, though a larger number reported a mix.

Of course, this was pre-FTX. It would be interesting to see whether results have changed in the next survey. And, of course, whatever the most common effect, results may differ in particular areas (e.g. people working in certain areas of policy).

I broadly wish we could get to a point where this is applicable, but I'm unsure whether the strategy outlined by the OP is the best one. Although, I'm by no means saying it is exactly comparable, but having experienced it myself, an oppressed minority has no solution but to get transparent about it. If you feel that you belong to a group with a bad reputation, you might experience fear and anxiety when opening up about it.

A small detail I'd add is that, as far as I perceive it, no one actually tries to debunk false ideas and over-generalizations related to EA. When I suggested doing so in the past, a few people actively discouraged me to do it. Some of those false ideas are emotionally hard to bear, others are completely outlandish. What made my coming-out possible, in contrast, was the wealth of ressources and arguments I could throw to people, or just knowing they'll run into them at some point.

This might be caused by us not owning our affiliation.

Yet EA is starting to become a well-identified group, something that people can have clichés about, and who can suffer unfair ostracisation. It's very hard for me to publish my affiliation if I don't feel defended from such downsides. So the circle continues.

I like your analysis of the situation as a prisoner's dilemma! I think this is basically right. At least, there generally seems to be some community cost (or more generally: negative externality) to not being transparent about one's affiliation with EA. And, as per usual with externalities, I expect these to be underappreciated by individuals when making decisions. So even if this externality is not always decisive since the cost of disclosing one's EA affiliation might be larger in some cases, it is important to be reminded of this externality – and the reminder might be especially valuable since EAs tend to be altruistically motivated!

I wonder if you have any further thoughts on what the positive effects of transparency are in this case? Are there important effects beyond indicating diversity and avoiding tokenization? Perhaps there also more 'inside-directed' effects that directly affect the community and not only via how it seems to outsiders?

Executive summary: The author argues that effective altruists should be more open about their affiliation with the EA movement, as it would benefit the community and help avoid negative stereotyping despite potential career risks.

Key points:

1. Being openly affiliated with EA is net positive for the world and individual careers, even if it comes with some risks.
2. If too many EAs hide their affiliation, it creates a "free-rider problem" where EA mainly gets publicity for negative events.
3. More open affiliation would show the true diversity of the EA community and prevent "tokenization" of the few vocal members.
4. Transparency about EA affiliation is rewarded with trust in the long run, as shown by an example AI governance organization.
5. The author has faced some career setbacks due to EA affiliation but believes it is still worth being open about one's beliefs and association with EA.

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